In Praise of the Garrulous Read online

  (country)

  (our)

  (handsome)

  (appears) (we love)

  isizwe

  setu

  esichle

  siyabonakala sisitanda

  (nation)

  (our)

  (handsome)

  (appears) (we love)

  izizwe

  zetu

  ezichle

  ziyabonakala sizitanda

  (nation)

  (our)

  (handsome)

  (appears) (we love)

  izintombi

  zetu

  ezinchle

  ziyabonakala sizitanda

  (girls)

  (our)

  (handsome)

  (appears) (we love)

  As we are talking about human language, it will come as no surprise that this is not always so regular. “m” and “n”, in particular, appear to trigger a more complex pattern of assonance.5

  amazwe

  etu

  amachle

  ayabonakala

  siwatanda

  (country)

  (our)

  (handsome)

  (appears)

  (we love)

  umuntu

  wetu

  omuchle

  uyabonakala

  simtanda

  (man)

  (our)

  (handsome)

  (appears)

  (we love)

  intombi

  yetu

  enchle

  iyabonakala

  siyitanda

  (girl)

  (our)

  (handsome)

  (appears)

  (we love)

  The aesthetics of language is called rhetoric, and in modern Anglo-Saxon culture, rhetoric is considered an unalloyed evil – such is our utilitarian approach to language and much else besides. However, rhetoric is merely a systematic study of those forms, figures and sounds that, for reasons that are usually unclear, are pleasant to the human ear. In my education, at least (and I think it was pretty typical of the English-speaking world at the time), rhetoric was proscriptive, but never, of course, called rhetoric. So I was told not to repeat the same word in a sentence. Good advice, but I was never told that the repetition of the same root in a sentence while inflecting it in a different way is pleasing, as in Dante’s Cred’io ch’ei credette ch’io credesse or Plautus’s Homo homini lupus (polyptoton). Moreover, if a sound is repeated not once but twice, then it can have a powerful effect, and again Dante provides us with an excellent example at the gates of hell: Per me si va nella città dolente, per me si va nell’eterno dolore, per me si va tra la perduta gente (anaphora). The single repetition of a word or sound can be pleasing if the first use comes at the end of a clause or sentence, and the next one at the beginning of the following clause or sentence (anadiplosis), and even in the same sentence if there is an inversion of a related pair of words, as in “They do not eat to live, but live to eat” (chiasmus). Of course, the random application of rhetorical forms would have laughable results; they have to be used sparingly, and the question of rhetoric is not unrelated to the question of register (Chapter Six). However, knowledge of rhetoric is useful to writers and, in particular, to poets. The rhetoric we are, or rather used to be, familiar with in the West is Greek rhetoric, which displaced other European rhetorical systems, many of which had been part of oral traditions (such as alliterative poetry of Germanic languages). It would be interesting to see the results of a comparative study of rhetorical systems to assess the degree of overlap (suggesting a kind of “natural” or innate rhetoric).

  Another apparently inherent aspect of human language is the persuasive power of the story, as opposed to reasoned argument. Consider, for example, the following story from the New Testament:

  And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, they say unto Him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou? This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not. So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning with the eldest, even unto the last; and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.6

  Religious teachers have always known that stories are more persuasive than reasoned argument. Reasoned argument cannot be considered inherent to language, and therefore requires greater effort on the part of the listener or reader. Conversely, humans are exceptionally adept at interpreting the moral significance of stories (exempla). I will attempt to distil the significance of this episode into reasoned prose:

  Although there are a set of rules by which we should live and by which we should be punished, real morality is not concerned with the behaviour of others, but with the behaviour of the self. This obsession with individual responsibility to God and man, and the resulting humiliation of the self is the great innovation of Christianity.

  The result is dull in comparison for two reasons. Firstly it lacks all narrative tension, and secondly, it loses all its nuances and ambiguities. The event was caused by the scribes’ desire to trap Jesus. His immediate reaction was to ignore them and hope that they would go away. He clearly found both punishing the woman and releasing her to be less than perfect outcomes. First-century Galilee must have been a society divided over how to treat an adulteress, as otherwise the question would not have been perceived to be dangerous by both Jesus and the scribes. Moreover, the scribes were not quite as bad as they might first appear, because when challenged by Jesus in the manner he chose, they slunk away in shame “convicted by their own conscience” (which means, at least, that they had one). There are a lot of things the text does not tell us (this is another privilege of narrative): we do not know what he was writing on the ground and we do not know what his real attitude to adultery was. Even the central message could be argued over, if it were not for the fact that elsewhere Jesus explicitly states, “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.”7 Narrative is extremely potent, but it is also ambiguous; hence we have also developed reasoned argument, which is less spontaneous and more laboured. Hume and Kant do not sell as well as Austen and Dickens. To some extent, our civilisation with all its merits and all its faults (often horrendous crimes of which previous societies were incapable) has been built on reason endlessly defending itself from our innate irrationalism (power intersects this axis, as it exploits both the rational and the irrational).

  I started to reflect on the persuasiveness of the stories we tell our children, when I read that Garibaldi suffered so many hardships because he wished to emulate the story of Cincinnatus. Needless to say, the historical accuracy of these stories is irrelevant to this argument. It is probably very important how such stories are glossed by the teacher when a child first hears it; the story of the possible stoning of the adulteress in the New Testament, which I have just quoted, had an enormous effect on me as a child, but the teacher set the framework by telling us that adultery, which was not explained, was not the sort of misconduct that deserved such a cruel punishment. Fifty or a hundred years earlier, a teacher might have presented the story in a different light. The story of Cincinnatus is the story of an honest and courageous man who accepts the position of dictator to save Rome from a crisis. Having successfully carried out this mission and served his term, Cincinnatus returned to his farm and ploughed his fields, whil
e refusing all the financial benefits of power. It is possible that in the climate of nationalism, a new force in European politics engendered by the Napoleonic Wars, Garibaldi’s teachers found the story of Cincinnatus particularly pertinent. Nice, his native city, had been annexed by France during the wars and for the first seven years of his life. Clearly it was not just the story that so influenced Garibaldi, but the story and the moment. Cincinnatus may not have existed or, if he did, he may not have carried out such deeds, but Garibaldi most certainly did, and he consciously established the link by calling himself “Dictator” of Sicily and then Southern Italy, and by relinquishing power immediately to go and plough the stony fields of his farm on the Island of Caprera. When he left, he only took a few bags of coffee, to which he appears to have been addicted. Stories, lacking a precise meaning, constitute a store of ideas held in the social mind, and are used to maintain the delicate balance between continuity and flexibility so essential to the survival of human societies. Like language, their openness to reinterpretation is so great that they should perhaps be called a language of ideas rather than a store.

  The power of stories remains, as do the problems that this causes. The ruin of Madame Bovary is that she takes a certain kind of literature too seriously. She believes that there is a reality reflected in those stories, while in fact they have no purpose other than to entertain and make publishers of romantic novelettes rich. Stories of the past were equally lacking in reality, but they served a purpose – the principal one being the glorification of warfare through heroes such as Achilles, Fionn and Loki. Stories, at their most effective, can express truths that escape rational argument (perhaps this is a definition of literature in its more restricted and exalted sense – or one to add to the many): Victor Serge’s The Case of Comrade Tulayev says more about the complex realities of Soviet Russia in the thirties than any number of tiresome political tracts, and there certainly were a lot of tiresome tracts written on that subject. On the other hand, the rationalist instinctively distrusts stories because, like rhetoric, they are open to abuse. They can be used to seek the truth as in the case of Serge’s novel, but they can also be used to distort it: they are the raw material of propaganda and harmful escapism. Rationalism may not be our natural state, but it has certain undoubted advantages. In any case, rationalism is here for very clear historical reasons; it is the result of a process, because at a certain stage in its development, the social mind takes on a life of its own and starts to govern the individual mind. The trigger for this increasing autonomy of the social mind has always been the technology of the word.

  Early hunter-gatherers may, then, have had vast vocabularies, a great store of stories, poetry and songs (themselves a store of moral precepts and methods for interpreting the world), an accumulated knowledge of their environment through observation, and only a limited recourse to rational and systematic thinking. As the degree of specialisation would have been minimal, the distinction between the individual mind and the social mind would also have been minimal, or to put it another way, their individual mind may have been larger than our own, but their social mind must have been much smaller.

  With the advent of farming communities and the organisation of increasingly large states to defend such communities from other states and from nomadic peoples, there was a greater need to keep records of property and to administrate the business of state. Given the urgency of that need, it is perhaps surprising that it took so long for writing to be invented.

  Like all great inventions, writing did much more than resolve the demand that had led to its creation. Some time in the fourth millennium before Christ, the so-called cuneiform script was invented. The patterns of its wedge-shaped marks were used to denote both sounds and ideograms in a dozen languages of the Middle East, including Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Hittite. The writer used a clay tablet which in the early period was left to harden in the sun but later was fired in a kiln.

  What interests us is how this changed language. Very quickly writing must have been used to record oral literature: most famously we have Gilgamesh (an Akkadian epic work found on 12 incomplete tablets) from the middle of the third millennium bc. It may be assumed that literary works went further back because extant material exists mainly due to a subsequent invention – that of the library. Initially archaeologists working for the British took little notice of the heap of broken crockery with patterned surfaces, when they broke into the King Ashurbanipal’s library in Nineveh (Iraq). The oldest literature in the world had fallen with the wooden ceilings from the higher storeys, and crumbled under the feet of those who rushed to take vases, weapons and bronze and ivory ornaments – the incidentals of that seventy-one-room palace of learning.

  By making possible written literature, cuneiform started the process whereby the spoken word lost its mnemonic significance, because there now existed a more efficient and reliable method for storing knowledge. Literature no longer evolved organically, but became something, dare I say it, dead. Someone who dared not only to say it, but also to shout it from the rooftops was Jean-Paul Sartre, with his talent for overstatement: “We all know that graveyards are peaceful places, and the most pleasant ones are called libraries.”8 Now Sartre is dead, and his books too are “written by a dead person about dead things”, but as I like these particular graveyards, I continue to read and enjoy Sartre, even if he is temporarily out of fashion. But then Sartre’s major fault was that he was too much of his time, and he misses the point about the deadness of literature. For him, the problem was that the writer had to be engaged with his times, while critics exploited the dead writers to avoid the real issues. He was probably right about the critics, but he is wrong about the deadness of literature. Literature remains relevant, even powerful and, I believe, essential to the psychological health of our societies, but when it became written rather than oral, it became a set of unchanging trophies attached to a certain name, and until relatively recent times, a canon. Whereas oral literature constantly renews itself in the language of each generation, written literature remains embedded in the language of the past and starts to fade. Now that the human voice can be recorded, we can see that that process of fading is much more rapid with the spoken word, because it retains all its contingent features (accent, syntax, vocabulary, tone and social context). This is why British films of the thirties appear to come from such a distant past (possibly even for those who can remember the thirties), but the written word takes longer to appear strange and when it does so, it is often to its benefit (the survival of the King James Bible, in spite of many attempts to see it off with translations into “modern” English, is perhaps the best example of this). Nevertheless, text does fade, just as the colours of an old master fade, and we risk losing what is salvageable by deifying the writing of the past. And yet there can be no doubt about what we gain from the ability of writing to preserve the thoughts of past.

  “Dead” is a polemical exaggeration, as the literature of dead writers continues to actively affect the way we think (perhaps less now than in the past). Established literature teaches but also upbraids. The luckiest writers were those who wrote when their literatures were young: Dante, Shakespeare, Luther, Pushkin. These men did not write in a language; they invented one. They had no great men of letters wagging their fingers at them: telling them not to split an infinitive or to avoid starting a sentence with a conjunction. They borrowed from different dialects and indeed languages. They didn’t have to invent their own rhetoric, because this too could be borrowed, and their good fortune was that they had often imperfectly understood these other rhetorics. They didn’t have to reinvent the wheel; they just had to decide what material to use in making one. Much to their credit, both Dante and Shakespeare were for centuries considered crude and uncultured writers.

  The works of Homer are thought to have been composed around 2,000 bc and written down around 1,000 bc, and that would have been the time in which the version we have was frozen for all posterity. If they had b
een able to write at the time of composition, we would have a different version and very probably it would have been composed in a different manner by literate poets. The works supposedly composed by Homer are written literature that still reflects its oral origins. In oral society, poetry was both mnemonics and aesthetics; with the invention of writing the former receives the first of many blows: it does not disappear immediately, but slowly loses importance, while aesthetic discoveries became more difficult to lose and therefore continuously enriched each other. Poetry becomes more sophisticated, but the poet less skilled.

  With the invention of writing and more particularly with the accumulation of written material stored in libraries, part of the social mind becomes tangible. It is no longer the case that everything that is not remembered must die without leaving any trace, and this changes the nature of language. Writing releases the human brain from the onerous task of remembering the most important things, and creates an entirely new kind of language: prose. Writing may also be the driver behind the gradual simplification of language mentioned in Chapter Three, particularly after the invention of printing. The complex ornamentation of language may no longer be required because of the withering of its mnemonic role. Personally I consider this thought a highly speculative one, as the more probable driver for simplification is imperialism, which expands use of a language to a vast number of new speakers over a relatively short period of time; this creates the need for less-inflected forms such as a shift from noun cases to prepositions.

  With prose, human language starts its long journey towards rationalism. This is how Lucien Polastron describes Ashurbanipal’s library in Nineveh:

  The patterned ceramic bisques of 1,200 different texts tell us what a royal library was like twentyfive centuries ago. To our eyes it was more primitive poetry than jurisprudence: invocations, ritual formulas, prophecies, Sumerian dictionaries, epic tales including The Saga of Gilgamesh, the creation story and the myth of Adapa the first man (all things that otherwise we would not have known), scientific handbooks and treatises, and popular tales such as The Poor Man of Nippur, precursors of A Thousand and One Nights. Following the demise of Ashurbanipal and his intellectual legacy, the sources after 631 bc go silent on this great enthusiast for books, his death and the ruin of his worldly estate.9